Reuse and enrichment for building an ontology for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

Building ontologies for mental diseases and disorders facilitates effective communication and knowledge sharing between healthcare providers, researchers, and patients. General medical and specialized ontolo- gies, such as the Mental Disease Ontology, are large repositories of concepts that require much effort to create and maintain. This paper proposes ontology reuse and automatic enrichment as means for design- ing and building an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) ontology. The methods are demonstrated by designing and building an ontology for the OCD. Ontology reuse is proposed through ontology alignment design patterns to allow for full, partial or nominal reuse. Enrichment is proposed through deep learning with a language representation model pre-trained on large-scale corpora of clinical notes and discharge summaries, as well as a text corpus from an OCD discussion forum. An ontology design pattern is proposed to encode the discovered related terms and their degree of similarity to the ontological concepts. The proposed approach allows for the seamless extension of the ontology by linking to other ontological resources or other learned vocabularies in the future. The OCD ontology is available online on Bioportal